


The Friend He Hadn't Met

by robotsdance



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 8x05, F/M, Fix-It, Ghosts, not quite a ghost yet Jaime, well almost ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 19:45:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19324858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotsdance/pseuds/robotsdance
Summary: Jaime meets the Stranger. It does not go as Jaime intends.





	The Friend He Hadn't Met

Jaime stood amongst the rubble of the Red Keep. Dust hung heavy in the air around him without moving. No sound of the outside world reached his ears. Beneath his feet, rock and stone and death. Surely death.

He looked around. Cersei was not here. Not the way he was. Her body was here, lying under the wreckage just a little to the right of where he stood. Where he stood without feeling the rocks beneath his boots. Where he stood and no time passed around him. Where he stood above where his body must be.

Cersei was not here, but Jaime was not alone.

The cloaked figure that stood beside him was impressive in height and otherworldly in stance. Jaime could not see what face lay beyond the hood worn low, if there was even a face to see, but it was of no matter. Jaime knew a god when he saw one.

Jaime looked up at the sky and sighed. No air filled his lungs. What a curious thing, he thought, to breathe without breathing. To be here somehow, and not. Curious.

The Stranger was wholly uninterested in the curiosities of existing outside of time. Outside of a body. The Stranger seemed wholly uninterested in everything but Jaime.

“Am I dead?” Jaime asked. It seemed important to get this question out of the way. He had been half-dead before but that was nothing at all like this. Nothing at all like standing atop where he knew his body must lie as the world held still around him.

“Perhaps,” the Stranger replied in a voice that Jaime felt as much as heard, “Perhaps not.”

“I intended to die,” Jaime said, honest in the unseeable face of the Stranger, determined to make it clear why he was here. Here in the ruins with Cersei instead of—

“Why? Few walk towards me so willingly.”

“It seemed the least I could do,” Jaime said, “Under the circumstances.”

“And what circumstances were those?”

“Cersei would not die alone.”There were few things Jaime was more certain of than this. Cersei would reclaim him in death, one way or another. So when the time came, when Cersei’s death was inevitable, Jaime went to her.

Cersei must die. Therefore he must die.

And now Cersei was dead.

So here he was. Right where he was supposed to be.

But Cersei was not here.

And the Stranger was.

*

They stood perfectly still atop the wreckage for a long time. Not that time was passing in the traditional sense, but something was happening as nothing happened. Their words sliding further and further away as they waited in shared silence.

Jaime shifted his weight and sighed.

The Stranger said nothing, and Jaime did not look down to see if any of his former self was visible beneath the stone he stood on.

*

Jaime was not uncomfortable. He was not physically exhausted or hungry or in pain. He supposed he was not physically anything, but when he held his hand out in front of him, he could see it.

He was not alive.

He was not dead.

But he was still Jaime.

And that was the problem.

*

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” Jaime asked, impatience getting the better of him as he looked over at the Stranger, exasperation and sarcasm bleeding from him even now. Surely the Gods had more important things to do than this.

“I am always where I am supposed to be.”

Jaime nodded once and looked away from the Stranger.

That settled it. He was not quite dead, but he would be soon. The Stranger was patient and necessary and here with Jaime. Jaime closed his eyes.

A waiting game then.

So be it.

*

Jaime counted the phantom beats of his heart in his hollow chest to pass what counted for time while he waited. Any moment now he would die. Any moment. He did not expect to get much higher than a hundred. He certainly did not expect the Stranger to let him get into the thousands.

But his stubborn heart kept beating.

*

Jaime lost count and opened his eyes.

He was still here.

The Stranger was still here.

And Jaime was not dead yet.

*

Unable to stand still any longer Jaime began to walk amongst the rubble, just back and forth at first, but then moving in expanding circles from the point where the Stranger was. The haze of dust was just as thick as it had been when Jaime first came to exist here, but he could see the dark shape of the Stranger to his left as he moved over the broken rock as easily as the smoothest road. Jaime’s footsteps did not disturb so much as a pebble beneath him, not a speck of dirt clung to him as he walked.

The Stranger did not follow him.

The Stranger just watched him from where he stood above Jaime’s body. Waiting.

*

The Stranger hadn’t said anything further to him, and Jaime could not fathom why. Jaime had done what he had to do. Why wouldn’t the Stranger?

Annoyed, Jaime turned his back on the Stranger for the first time. It wasn’t until the Stranger was behind him and Jaime took a step in the opposite direction that it occurred to him that maybe that was exactly what the Gods were waiting for. Maybe they never forgave him for stabbing a king in the back. Maybe that was how the Stranger would claim him, a sword through the back of the Kingslayer. Fitting.

But no sword came.

So Jaime kept walking.

Sooner or later the Stranger would stop him.

*

The Stranger did not stop him.

*

The land around him was as he had known it but perfectly still, impossibly beautiful. Peaceful even.

In the sky, birds were suspended mid-flight above him. The grass did not ripple in the breeze, did not bend beneath his feet.

Jaime was the only thing that moved.

So he kept moving.

*

The Stranger was just a tiny figure in the distance when Jaime realized he was walking north.

Jaime stumbled to a stop. He reached out for a nearby tree to steady himself and his arm moved right through it. He looked behind him and then forwards again, getting his bearings. He had not planned to head north. He had not planned to get much further than a few steps in any direction.

But he was walking north.

And the Stranger was still doing nothing to stop him.

It seemed the Stranger would let him walk all the way to Winterfell if he wanted to. The thought hit him in the chest like walls collapsing around his ribcage, though mercifully he couldn’t remember the specifics of that sensation. But the more he thought of what he’d left in the North, the more the rocks felt like the less painful memory.

Jaime didn’t deserve to set foot in Winterfell. And he would not, he vowed, not even as a shadow of his former self. He refused to haunt her. Not any more than memories already would.

He turned back towards the Stranger.

*

When Jaime returned the Stranger stood exactly where Jaime had left them.

Jaime had been gone for hours and hours, days maybe. There was no way to tell. Time did not exist here the way it usually did. Night did not follow day. The sun did not retreat to make way for the stars.

He took his place beside the Stranger.

The Stranger made no mention of how long Jaime had been gone, made no mention of Jaime leaving or coming back.

The Stranger said nothing to Jaime at all.

*

Jaime went through the motions of taking a deep breath before he declared, “I deserve to die.”

“Leave the judgements to the Gods.” The Stranger spoke with no indication that they had been here together in silence for an infuriating amount of time.

“Then judge me and be done with it!” Jaime insisted, “I am ready!”

“If you were ready to die here you would have done so already.”

Jaime wondered if it was possible to kill a god with one hand and no weapons.

Jaime wondered if he would try anyway.

*

Another age slid by in which Jaime waited for the Stranger to do what they were supposed to.

The Stranger remained as stubbornly silent as Jaime himself.

*

Jaime sat down with an exaggerated groan that the Stranger ignored.

Waiting to die was such a chore. Jaime had suffered immeasurable boredoms before, but leave it to the Gods to devise such a perfect agony for him.

He picked up a rock to fiddle with, perhaps the rock he would throw at the Stranger’s head, the rock he would use to provoke the Gods into doing what they were here to do.

The stone was solid and heavy in his palm before he realized what was happening. He pulled his hand back as if he’d been burned and the rock clattered to the ground and tumbled away as Jaime stared as his hand. He could not touch anything else in this suspended world. Nothing. Nothing but the rocks between him and—

Jaime was no fool. He knew what lay just beneath the stones he sat upon.

Maybe that’s what he had to do. Maybe he had to see for himself.

He picked up a rock and moved it aside. Then another. And then another.

Beside him the Stranger watched his progress with interest.

*

It did not take long. Half a dozen stones. Half a dozen stones and he was looking down at his own face amongst the other broken things.

He expected everything to end the moment he looked upon his body. Expected the Stranger to take him away to whichever hell he deemed appropriate for him the next instant. He expected to see blood, to see his body crushed and mangled beyond hope. He expected, at the very least, to feel something monumental gazing down at himself so close to death that the Stranger was standing vigil.

But all Jaime thought as he looked down at his body was that he had seen himself look far worse.

*

Jaime stood up and took his place alongside the Stranger once again.

“Why am I still here?” A question he should have asked an age ago no doubt.

“Because you have a choice.”

Jaime shook his head. He and Cersei had been bound together from the beginning. They were nothing together and then they were something. And for a long time, she was everything, absolutely everything to him. A lifetime of atrocities between them, what difference would a choice make now? His fate was sealed so long ago, nothing else mattered. Nothing he did after would ever make up for what he did before. Why did he have to keep explaining this to everyone? He deserved to die. Why wouldn’t they just let him?

“Why would you deny me this?!” Jaime demanded, rage and despair on his tongue, “I am here. I came here to die. I deserve to, just as my sister did.”

“Perhaps,” the Stranger said, “But even now you have a choice.”

“Why?”

“She vouched for you,” the Stranger said.

Jaime’s throat tightened and it felt like being alive, like being at Winterfell. There was only one person in the world who would do such a thing, “Brienne.”

“She vouched for you,” the Stranger repeated, like this statement alone justified where Jaime now stood, outside of time, neither alive or dead.

“Brienne vouched for me.” Her name was raw in his throat.

“Yes.”

“To you.”

“Yes,” the Stranger said, “Is that really so hard to believe?”

Jaime dropped his gaze and spoke to where the Stranger’s cloak met the rocks, ashamed of the devotion he had but did not deserve. “She sees the best of me.”

“She sees the truth.”

“She…” Jaime swallowed, “She loves me. Loved me.”The words ripped from his lungs but came out whisper quiet. To admit what he left, what he did to her as she held his head in her hands and begged him to stay. With her. Whatever testimony Brienne had given on his behalf was undeserved. He was not worthy of her in life, he was not worthy of her in death. Of that he was certain.

“She sees all of you, and loves you,” the Stranger said, “What is that if not the truth?”

*

“What do you want Jaime Lannister? Cersei is dead. If you wish to join her I will not stop you. But you have a choice.”

It was the first thing the Stranger had said to him unprompted and it filled Jaime with fresh fury. How could the Stranger ask such a question of him? As if what Jaime wanted had anything to do with anything.

“It doesn’t matter! I don’t deserve to live! I don’t deserve anything. Anything but this,” Jaime spat, gesturing to the ruins where Cersei lay dead, where he lay beside her, “This. This I deserve.”

“I did not ask what you think you deserve. Your opinion on that matter is clear. But I will ask again, not what you think you deserve, but what it is that you want. What do you want Jaime Lannister?”

He considered saying “death” to get this over with, but he did not. Jaime said nothing. A lifetime of wanting impossible, forbidden things lay behind him.

But in his silence, the answer came. An answer so terrible and true that he fought against it still, even now, just as he had for so long when he was alive. Just as he had when he rode south for the last time. And just as much as Jaime knew he did not deserve her, knew he was not worthy of such an answer to the Stranger’s question, he knew it was the only answer he could give.

When he spoke he did not meet the Stranger’s gaze, “Brienne.”

The Stranger did not nod, not exactly, but there was a slight gesture visible beneath the cloak.

“So,” the Stranger said, “You have a choice to make.”

Jaime looked down at his body, half-buried but remarkably undamaged. Alive.

“I have a choice.”

“You do.”

“Cersei is dead.” It was not grief Jaime felt as he spoke the words.

“Yes.”

“And Brienne…” He couldn’t even finish the sentence, unsure which words were worthy of Brienne. There were none of course. Brienne was so far beyond what he could comprehend. But all the same he was overcome by the possibilities hidden inside of each word that dared come to mind.

Every one of them felt like hope.

“Yes,” the Stranger agreed to everything Jaime could not say, everything Jaime could not hide from himself, “Brienne.”

Brienne.

Brienne smiling against his skin, her fingertips on his wrist as she traced the thick scars with such gentleness he feared he might cry, so unused to such kindness, how quickly her room became their room and that time she dragged him into it, her strong hands grabbing his tunic to pull him to her, sparring in the yard, the freezing cold yard, the warmth of their room afterwards, standing on his toes to kiss her that first time, and then so many times after that, the way she had stood and vouched for him, that bath they shared a lifetime ago, the long road south, a bear and armour and a sword, her sword, Oathkeeper, the look in her eyes when he knighted her, her smile when she stood as a knight of the seven kingdoms for the first time, knowing for certain that he had finally done something right, calling her ser, calling her ser when they were alone together, the weight of the heavy blankets over their bodies as they slept in their bed, fighting: each other once upon a time, and then side by side, back to back.

Jaime closed his eyes, afraid to believe the life that roared in his chest. Surely this was just a final cruel joke at his expense. To make him feel this before it was all taken for good. But the Stranger had been anything but cruel to him and Jaime was not dead yet.

How could he possibly have this choice? He did not deserve—

But the Stranger did not care what Jaime thought he deserved.

So Jaime looked up into the face of death itself and wanted Brienne.

The Stranger looked down at Jaime, considering.

“You want her,” the Stranger said, like it had been that simple all along, “Go get her.”

So he did.


End file.
